SEO Copywriting 101 for Freelance Writers
You see it time and time again in freelance writing job posts: “need SEO copy,” “must have SEO experience,” “SEO-optimized content.”
I’ll give you a little hint: if you want to become a freelance writer, you need to know SEO copywriting.
Sure, clients are hiring you to speak to their customers. But they’re also hiring you to speak to search engines. In fact, organic search traffic is usually one of the key drivers businesses use to get new eyes on their products.
Organic search traffic just means people who come to a website through Google. Why Google? Because let’s be honest, Google is the only search engine that matters. Sorry, Bing. People are out there with questions and problems, and your client has the solution. Your job is to make sure that people find your client’s solution and not a competitor’s. So how do you do that? SEO! AKA search engine optimization. It sounds scary, but it’s actually really easy.
How SEO Works
Google (and other, less important search engines) “crawl” websites to look at their content. Then an algorithm decides how relevant that content is for various searches.
When you optimize your content for search engines, you’re making sure it’s as relevant as it possibly can be to a certain topic. You do this by sticking to the topic, providing a lot of relevant information, and using the keywords that people are actually searching. There’s a few other little tips and tricks to it (but we’ll get into those later).
SEO Copywriting: Best Practices
Every URL needs a unique targeted keyword.
This is where I see a lot of website owners and clients mess up. They use the same keywords over and over again in their posts. This does nothing to help the overall SEO value of your site.
Every URL (for a web page or a blog post) should be optimized for a unique keyword or phrase. They can be similar, but they can’t be identical. Why? Because Google is looking at individual URLs. So if you use “natural skincare” as the targeted keyword in three of your blog posts, those blog posts will compete against each other in the search results. Instead, be more specific and use a unique keyword for each URL. For example, you might want to write one blog post about “natural skincare for oily skin” and another one about “the best natural skincare ingredients”.
Find your targeted keywords.
I personally always use Google Adwords for this, but there are a lot of tools out there that you can try. Unfortunately, you have to pay for pretty much all of them. Here’s how to do it:
- Go to ads.google.com
- Click on “Tools & Settings,” “Keyword Planner,” and “Discover New Keywords”.
- Type in whatever you’re trying to write about. For this article, I searched “SEO Copywriting”. Then click “Get results”.
- Sort your results by popularity. Look for the keyword with the greatest number of average monthly searches, and with low or medium competition. This means that fewer websites are using this keyword andthat your website will be more likely to gain the top spot. Don’t worry if the keyword doesn’t have a lot of average monthly searches. It’s better to be super specific so that the people who come to your website are exactly the potential customers you’re trying to target.
- If you’re writing blog posts, you can do this work ahead of time and plug the keywords into your content calendar in Google Sheets.
Use that keyword or phrase.
Obviously you’ll want to pepper that keyword into your SEO copywriting. Most SEO experts consider 1 to 3 percent as an ideal keyword density. So if your copy is 100 words, your keyword should show up 1 to 3 times. If you’re writing a blog post, make sure that the keyword shows up in the first paragraph, preferably in the very first sentence.
Then you need to make sure your keyword is also included in the following places:
- Title of the page
- Meta description (the preview text that Google displays beneath the title)
- Headings (as in “SEO Copywriting Tips” above!)
- Images and alt text (which Google uses for Google image search)
- The URL of the page itself
Check your work with Yoast.
If you’re working with WordPress, Yoast is pretty much the gold standard of search engine optimization. All you have to do is plug in your targeted keyword and follow the plug-in’s suggestions to improve your SEO copywriting. And it’s free! Woo!
Hint: you can use this to optimize your post before you send it to your client. Make sure that you include all the relevant information like meta description, image alt text, etc. They’ll be hella impressed, and your work will perform much better for them.
Top 2 Worst SEO Copywriting Mistakes You Can Make:
- This isn’t an SEO copywriting mistake per se, but just be wary of anyone who emails you about their SEO service. A lot of shady SEO services out there who take advantage of the fact that most website owners don’t know much about SEO, but all want to be on the first page of Google. I’m sure there are a few good ones out there, but no one fully understands Google’s algorithm, and anyone who tells you that they do is a scammer. You’re better off just following these tips and doing it yourself. OKAY. RANT OVER.
- Don’t keyword-stuff. Keyword stuffing — shoving a bunch of keywords into your copy in a way that doesn’t really make sense for a reader — sounds like it might be helpful to drive up your search engine rankings. And it was…in 2005. The Google algorithm is now sophisticated enough to know when you’re trying to cheat. If you keep your copy natural, relevant, and written for humans, you’ll be golden.
So at the end of the day, SEO copywriting is actually pretty simple. Even if you consider yourself a creative person who doesn’t “get” technical stuff, you CAN do this! But if you have any questions, leave a comment below or contact me!
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